Willy Tarreau, author of HAProxy, semi-recently
wrote a very in-depth article about HAProxy’s reload process and how it
could, under certain conditions, drop/reset connections during reloading.
With HAProxy 1.8, this will finally be no more.

Just like you wouldn’t use a bucket to fill up an entire swimming pool, you shouldn’t use screen to manage your daemons. Stable and flexible IT infrastructure is all about using the right tools for the right job.

About a week ago, we at TravelBird had this bizarre problem with nginx workers
segfaulting on TLS connections from Safari and curl, but not Firefox or Chrome.
Nginx logs would state the worker process exited on signal 11 and dmesg
would show the feared
nginx[12345]: segfault at 8 ip 000000000042a08d sp 00007fffe5eebca0 error 4 in nginx[400000+b9000]

It’s been a few months since my last post and a lot has happened during that time.
One of the biggest has been that of leaving my old job at a&m impact
and instead accepting a position at TravelBird, a relatively
young startup in Amsterdam (our capital city).

Chances are, if you’re reading this article and you’re a programmer, you’re working with Git, or at least some form of version control.
But do you really get (g)it? This article will dive into what makes Git, or any other comparable distributed version control system, your new best friend.

SPF, or Sender Policy Framework, is a DNS-based technique aimed at stopping sender address forgery on emails. If you’re using ~all in yours and you’re not actively in the process of migrating over to using SPF, you’re doing it wrong. (Yes, Google, Apple, Microsoft, that includes all of you too!)

Leveraging the power of Puppet and using only about 35 lines of puppet code, we can install Err directly from Git(Hub), into it’s own isolated virtualenv and have it automatically update whenever the Git repository changes. How awesome is that?

Last week I gave a 5-minute lightning talk to my colleagues about logging.
Sadly, very little attention is given to logging anything in the applications and websites that are made at a&m impact, so I felt this talk was quite necessary.

Where I work, if an employee quits, we make a backup of all their mail before removing their user account from Google Apps (which we use for all our email/calendar stuff). Since I’m the resident sysadmin guy, this task tends to fall upon me to do whenever someone has left the building.

I was faced with an issue today which seemed extremely simple at first, but proved to throw up one unexpected hurdle. The task seemed simple. A number of sites built by my employer needed to have a specific module updated, all I had to do was generate a list of candidates. Sounds easy enough, right?

In computer programming, it’s very common to make the very first program you write do nothing more than print ‘Hello world!’. Carrying on that tradition to my blog itself, I thought it only fitting to let the very post on this blog consist of little more than that, too. :)